Fiction

“I’m not trying to get rid of you at all,” I lie. That’s exactly what I want to do. Despite his presence as a permanent fixture in my emotional life, I know he can’t give me a commitment.

If you’re going to order a dozen tropical drinks and dump their contents onto the table, then start sculpting those contents into the shape of your would-be daughter, the late-afternoon rush at Señor Frog’s is the time and place to do it.

‘Is that common?’ I ask Lee during a lull in the conversation. ‘Hurling cabbages over with catapults?’

‘What, you don’t have catapults in Myanmar?’ Lee quips. ‘Or cabbages?’

‘Well, we use coconuts,’ I say, and the audience laughs. 

‘What, for catapults?’ 

Rod jumps in. ‘Ignore him, Thandar. You haven’t been in the U.K. for very long, have you?’

‘I arrived about four years ago,’ I tell him. ‘Bit of a culture shock.’

Jeanie’s friends show her videos of dance recitals and flag football games, and she oohs and aahs in all the right places, but the goddamn grandbabies are getting on her nerves. She wants it to be her turn.

She had no idea why her mother had an envelope of 1960s lesbian wedding photos. She sold them on eBay to a collector, who gave them to a historian, who asked around and found me, blah blah blah. I am so young I am a different person, in my tailored shift dress and my hair up in a twist. But the photos could be of any couple, it wouldn’t matter. My wife will never see them.

My sluggish-with-death brain puts it together: Devine is making an episode about me. My ghost.

I have only one desire: that some of my stolen eggs will be used to make commercial mayonnaise.

Immediately after graduating from Purdue University with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I underwent a surgical procedure in order to invert my body in such a manner that most of my internal organs would be carried on the outside of my skin.